by Susan Sey
“I’m as dumb as you are ugly.”
Willa considered that. “I liked you better dumb.”
“I liked you better ugly.”
Addy said, “For heaven’s sake, Georgie. She’s meeting her…person…in half an hour.”
Georgie took a handful of Willa’s damp hair — starting to wave up in the humidity — and sighed. “We’ll go for the natural look.”
“You’ll go for the exit,” Willa said. “Out.”
“Fine by me.” Georgie shrugged and said to Addy, “She’s breaking the deal, though, not me. You’re witnessing this, right?”
“Willa, come on.” Addy held out one of the shopping bags, gave it an encouraging little shake. It sounded luxuriously heavy and Willa wanted whatever was in it. She hated that she wanted it, hated herself for wanting it. But she was only human and she’d poured every last cent into the business — and into the lawyers — for the past decade. Clothes came somewhere below bills and food on her list of priorities. And pretty, delicate clothes? They were listed with high heels and European vacations in the Things To Admire In Magazines category. They weren’t things she could ever actually buy. Not with her life, and the budget that went with it. “It’s just a few things so Georgie can see how different styles work with your body type.”
“I’m five foot two, I weight one hundred and fifteen pounds, and evidently I wear whatever size bra this is.”
“How can a grown woman not know her own bra size?” Georgie wondered aloud. “How does that even happen?”
It happened when little girls suddenly developed big boobs which caught the attention of skeevy men. It happened when said little girls decided not to even think about, let alone show off, such things. But Willa wasn’t about to hand Georgie that little bit of ammunition.
She turned back to Addy. “Seriously, how much more information could she possibly need?”
“It’s six eighteen, Willa,” Georgie announced. “Just put on the damn clothes and let me at your hair or you’ll be late for your lady date.”
“It’s not a date,” Willa muttered, but she took the bag Addy handed her. “And I’m only doing this so you people will go away.”
“It’s as good a reason as any,” Addy said soothingly.
Willa shot a finger at Georgie. “But no makeup. I draw the line at makeup.”
Georgie blanched. “Mascara isn’t makeup. It’s…necessary.”
“Power tools,” Willa reminded her.
Georgie scowled. “Just give me the damn comb.”
CHAPTER 12
ELI STOOD OVER the miniature grill cemented into the yard outside his cabin and admired his glowing coals. He’d spent the last forty-five minutes coaxing these babies into emitting a perfectly even five hundred degrees or so, ideal for grilling the gorgeous steaks he’d found at a butcher shop down in Hornby Harbor yesterday.
He lifted his sweating beer bottle toward what he judged to be the southwest, a silent toast to the woman who’d insisted he put in his time at the family restaurant irrespective of his career ambitions to the contrary. Fighting wild fires was a young man’s game, she’d told him, but grill skills were forever. Were mothers ever wrong? He doubted it.
He checked his watch. Seven on the button. He figured Willa for the punctual type so he’d wrapped a couple of potatoes in foil an hour ago, tossed them in the dinky little oven in the cabin and cranked the dial to four hundred. He planned to unbag the salad and open the wine when she arrived. Then they could both stand sweating over his perfect fire and grill until the steaks were just barely unable to moo. Then he’d feed her.
Something uncurled inside him, something deliciously edgy and sharp. There was a reason people usually chose restaurants for a first date. Restaurants were polite, safe. They were a neutral place to feel each other out, to decide if there was anything between you worth exploring.
Cooking for a woman, though? Feeding her from your own hand? That was a show of strength, deliberate proof of your ability to care for her, both of which any woman worth having would require before she’d even consider an invitation to your bed.
Not that Eli had any intention of asking Willa to his bed. Not tonight, anyway. Oh, he’d like to satisfy her body in every way imaginable but tonight he’d satisfy her stomach. He’d start there, then take his time with the rest of it. If he decided there was even going to be a rest of it.
That pleasant tension in his gut coiled tighter. He hadn’t felt anything like this for so long he barely recognized it. But he did. Some things you didn’t forget, and wanting a woman was one of them. And he wanted Willa. Wanted her with a fierce intensity that should be making him nervous but wasn’t. She simply spoke to him on a level so fundamental he didn’t know if he could even articulate it. She sang to him like that damn thinnie of hers, and something deep inside him, something ancient and wise, heard her and answered.
Who was he to argue with something like that?
Her truck rumbled up the two-track in the woods while he was still pondering the question and he grinned at the sight of it. It wasn’t fancy or flashy but it got the job done and would probably run forever. It suited her perfectly.
Then she opened the door and slid to the ground and Eli realized he didn’t know a damn thing about her. He didn’t know a damn thing, period. He simply stared, his nervous system thrown into chaos.
The small, tough, no-nonsense woman he’d asked to dinner had disappeared. The woman who’d scowled at him from under the brim of a ball cap and didn’t care about the cider sludge on her t-shirt was nowhere to be seen. In her place stood a gray-eyed warrior-fairy. Where the hell had she been hiding all that hair? It poured down her back in a luxurious tangle so thick and black it looked like ravens tumbling out of the sky. Women paid gazillions of dollars for hair like that, he thought stupidly. Hair that implied she’d just crawled out of some seriously tangled sheets. Hair that made even a stodgy man want to sink his hands into it and his teeth into some other things. And Eli wasn’t the stodgy sort.
He blinked and tried to focus on the whole picture. Maybe it would kick-start his brain if he could get past the hair. She was wearing a flippy skirt the color of storm clouds, he saw finally, that ended only a few inches north of her pretty knees. There was a matching strappy tank top, too, with something a shade lighter thrown over it. It had sleeves, so a woman might call it a sweater but it was so gauzy that Eli could see straight through it to the warm skin glowing underneath.
He stood there for a long moment trying to remember how to swallow. Willa turned and gave her truck door the mighty heave it required to shut. That flippy skirt did its thing and Eli’s heart tried to leap out of his chest. He rubbed a hand over it, and let his eyes follow those slender legs all the way down to the ground. Where he discovered that Willa had paired that pretty-floaty-girly outfit with her scarred old work boots. Everything in him settled down into a deep, hungry glow. He liked the skirt, no question. Liked the hair even better. But he liked them both a lot more now that he recognized her.
“Hey,” she said shortly. Was she nervous? His heart lurched dangerously toward tenderness.
“Hey yourself,” Eli said and let his eyes drift back up. She was a curvy little package, wasn’t she? Strong and lean, built for endurance and surprise, but the good lord in all his wisdom hadn’t skimped on the curves. It was enough to make a believer out of Eli, and he’d had some serious doubts over the years.
And that was just her body. Her face was…
He drifted off again, taking it in. Lord, her face. All those angles and edges. That chin, so ready for a fight. That mouth, so soft and curvy and vulnerable, right next door. And those huge gray eyes, alive with wary pleasure, impatience and…something else he didn’t have a name for but wanted to erase. And maybe punch whoever had put it there in the first place.
“What?” she snapped. “It’s just a skirt.”
“With your boots,” he murmured. “I know. I love those boots.”
“Th
en why are you staring at me that way?”
“I’ve never seen you without your ball cap,” he said helplessly. “Your eyes are really—” He stepped closer, lifted a hand toward her cheekbone but stopped short of touching it. Didn’t know why. Maybe he was afraid she’d disappear if he did. “Are you sure you’ve never seen a fairy?”
“Pretty sure.”
“I have.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, just now.” He feathered one finger over her cheekbone. “If there’s not a fairy somewhere in your DNA, I’ll eat my hat.”
Her lips quirked. “You’re not wearing a hat.”
“I’ll eat yours then.”
“I’m not wearing one either.”
“So I see. That’s probably why I’m not making any sense.”
Those huge gray eyes searched his, a tiny frown pinching together her black brows. “You’re doing fine,” she decided. “We’re both doing fine.”
“Aren’t we?” He grinned at her, charmed by the serious evaluation. “Let’s keep doing fine, shall we?”
“Okay by me.” She blinked up at him. “What’s next on the agenda?”
“Grilling.” He nodded toward the coals a few yards away, turning the air wavy with heat. “I have a couple steaks inside just waiting to be transformed into dinner. I thought we could see about that while the potatoes finish baking. You can tell me how you got turned into a fairy since I saw you last.”
She scowled and he wanted to kiss it right off her curvy lips. “I got hijacked by a love-sick bride and her evil henchmaid.”
“That sounds like a story best told over a drink.”
“It might take more than one.” She shoved a bottle into his hands. He hadn’t noticed it there. Too busy gawking, he supposed. “Here. The henchmaid said I had to bring a hostess gift — she thinks I’m a lesbian, by the way — and I definitely deserve a drink for not punching her in her stupid, perfect face when she stuck her tape measurer up my hoohah, so here you go.”
“Wait, she stuck the tape measurer up your hoohah but she thinks you’re the lesbian?”
Willa shot a finger at him. “Thank you!”
He smiled. “I have a corkscrew inside.”
“What are we standing here for?”
“No idea.” He settled a hand in the small of her back which was tidy and warm and custom designed for his palm, and nudged her toward the porch.
Willa marched up the cabin steps, exquisitely aware of Eli’s eyes on her bare legs. The silky fabric of her skirt whispered against her thighs and that tumbling awareness that had been simmering in her belly since he’d taken her hand in the thinnie a few nights ago churned into wild life. It set her nerve endings on fire until she could feel each super-charged particle of air swirling over her skin.
She definitely needed a glass of wine. Something to do with her hands anyway. Something that didn’t involve spearing her fingers into the brutally short stubble of hair covering Eli’s scalp just to see if it would feel as deliciously rough against her skin as she thought it might.
Her palms tingled with anticipation, so she gripped the doorknob hard enough to bring herself back to reason and twisted. She breezed into the house with what she hoped was charming nonchalance.
She stopped short in the doorway, her throat closing on the unmistakable stench of burnt fur. Eli froze behind her and she turned to meet his stricken eyes. He knew, too. He recognized the smell. Many people didn’t but Eli did. She wondered again what had put that unbearable sadness into his eyes, the sorrow she’d understood before she’d known anything else about him.
Smoke leaked out of the oven to her left and she rushed to it. Snatched up a dishtowel and yanked the door open. Eli reached over her to spin the dial to off. Smoke billowed out of the black cavity of the oven and she flapped the dishtowel to get a better look. Nothing inside but a pair of foil-wrapped lumps she assumed were the potatoes Eli had intended for dinner. They didn’t look burnt, plus potatoes didn’t have fur. Not usually.
“What is it?” he asked behind her, his voice taut. “It was empty when I put the potatoes in, I swear it. I checked. After the snake in the toilet, I checked.”
“I believe you.” She kept flapping. “Open the windows, will you?”
Eli jogged away to open every window in the cabin, all three of them. The smoke appeared to be leaking from the burners as much as from the oven itself and Willa said, “Oh no.”
“Oh no?” Eli was back at her side in an instant. “What’s oh no?”
Willa held a hand over one of the burners. Hot. Very hot. “No insulation between the burners and the oven,” she informed him grimly. “Eaten away by mice, probably.”
“Okay.”
“Leaving a nice warm space where they might then build a nest.”
“Oh hell.”
Willa located a metal spatula on the counter, chose the smokier of the two burners and pried up the heating element. She pulled out the aluminum liner beneath it and sure enough, there was a blackened lump of paper and cotton and who even knew what else. Mice were handy little scavengers when it came to building their homes. But this wasn’t just a home, she saw quickly, her heart sinking. It was a nursery. There were at least four tiny bodies in the smoldering remains.
“Oh hell,” Eli said again, his voice ragged, his distress sharp in the smoky air. “Jesus help me, I baked the babies.”
“You didn’t know.” Willa scooped up the smoking lump and laid it carefully in the burner plate she’d removed. She turned to face Eli, and the naked pain in those gorgeous eyes stopped the breath in her lungs. She didn’t think about it, she simply reached for him. She slid both hands up his arms, smoothed them over shoulders tight with dismay, and took his jaw in her palms. “Eli, look at me. You didn’t know. How could you know?”
She wouldn’t say anything as stupid as they were just mice or it could’ve been worse. His pain was a living thing, thick and oily in the air around him. She could smell it all around them, as acrid as the smoke clinging to the cabin’s ceiling, and just as hard to breathe through. If this was about mice, she’d eat the hat this time.
She rubbed a thumb over one sharp cheekbone. “Eli,” she murmured. “Come back.”
“It’s following me,” he said softly, his gaze still on the smoldering remains of the nest.
“What is?”
“Death.” He shook his head. “I missed my stop, Willa. I was supposed to get off the bus with everybody else but I didn’t, and now it feels like every breath I take I’m stealing from somebody else.” He stared blindly at the stove. “I can’t even make a fucking baked potato without killing something.”
“Do you think it works that way?” she asked. His pain was so thick she could barely breathe through it but this was an important question. She’d never thought to ask anybody before. Had never had anybody to ask. “Do you really think there’s somebody up there balancing the scales, spinning and cutting our threads? Do you really think we’re part of a plan? Do you think we matter that much?”
“I don’t know. Christ, I wish I did.” He brought his eyes to hers finally and her throat closed. It simply clamped shut in the face of his agony. “Do you?”
“I don’t know either.” She gave in to the low-grade hum of need still itching and pulling at her, and slid one palm into the rough rasp of stubble covering his scalp. He closed his eyes and leaned into her touch like a big cat. “Wouldn’t that be nice, though?” She closed her eyes, too. It was more private this way. She could drop her words into the darkness between them like wishes into a well. “It would be a comfort, wouldn’t it, to think our pain meant something? To think we mattered somehow?”
“You think we don’t?”
“I didn’t say that.” She pulled her palm slowly down the curve of his skull to rest against the nape of his neck. It was smooth and warm and so tense. She drew her finger lightly down the line where his spinal column met his skull and back up again. “We might not matter to some higher po
wer — if one even exists — but we can matter to somebody else. Pain is a fact of life. We can’t escape it but we don’t have to deal it out ourselves. Not on purpose. Life gives us choices every day, and we can choose to be kind. We can choose to be honorable. We can choose to use whatever we’re lucky enough to have to protect somebody who wasn’t so lucky. We can matter, Eli. It’s just a question of to whom.”
CHAPTER 13
“YOU MATTER TO me,” Eli told her. Her fingers were firm on the back of his neck, as if she could command out the demons of grief and guilt with nothing but her touch. And the funny thing was, it was working. Eli fully understood how ridiculous that sounded, even within the confines of his own head. But whatever she was doing to him, it was totally working. “I don’t know why you matter, Willa, but you do. You’re so damn still.”
Her breath was sweet in the space between them and he could feel her absorbing his words, pondering them in that calm, serious way she had. “That’s a good thing?”
“It’s a goddamn miracle.” He lifted his hands and placed them unerringly on the curve of her waist. He didn’t even have to open his eyes. He just knew where she was, like there was some kind of primitive echolocation thing at work feeding him her location with exquisite, constant accuracy. In his mind’s eye, she was simply there, always.
Touching her was an instant and astounding relief. He’d needed this, needed her, and satisfying that need nearly put him on his knees. It unstrung the muscles grief had yanked so pitilessly tight, and he lowered his head until his forehead rested against hers. Calm lapped at him like Lake Superior licking at the rocky beach. “It’s so noisy inside my head, Willa. It’s constant and exhausting and I can’t get away from it, no matter how far I walk. Do you have any idea how many pairs of boots I’ve worn through looking for even a second of quiet?”
“Too many,” she murmured, and that curvy mouth was so close he could feel as much as hear her words. They touched his lips, his jaw, his chin. Hunger stirred inside him, tangled into the precious stillness she’d laid over him like a blanket, and wove itself into something new. Something unknown and potentially dangerous, but radically compelling.
